


Pulp Fiction: Fantasy vs Reality in BBC Sherlock

by notagarroter (redbuttonhole)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e06 The Final Problem, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 22:13:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11907258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbuttonhole/pseuds/notagarroter
Summary: Another attempt to understand TFP in the context of previous episodes.





	Pulp Fiction: Fantasy vs Reality in BBC Sherlock

“Pulp fiction” refers to the 19th and 20th century practice of printing lurid, sensational stories on cheap, dingy paper made from wood pulp.  Like the magazines themselves, the stories were designed to be highly consumable and disposable.  

Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were technically not pulp because The Strand was a glossy magazine. Nevertheless, there was a certain sensationalism and disposableness to these stories of murder, mayhem, and crime.

BBC Sherlock, on the other hand, is “prestige-television”, and yet it is very self-aware about its origins in the worlds spawned by pulp fiction.  It plays with this idea repeatedly, forcing the lurid melodrama of pulp storytelling up against the prestige drama’s expectations that stories be rooted in a human-scaled world of believable, recognizable situations and emotions.  

  


> JOHN: In real life. There _are_ no arch-enemies in real life. Doesn’t happen.  
>  SHERLOCK: Doesn’t it? Sounds a bit dull.

* * *

In the beginning, Sherlock appears as a larger-than-life character, or at least as someone who wishes to be seen that way.  John pushes back against this, suggesting that Sherlock’s worldview is an impossible fantasy.  

Similarly in TBB, Sherlock’s glamorously choreographed fight with a cartoonish baddie is cross-cut with John exchanging sharp words with a chip and pin machine.

Mycroft is a somewhat different case, because publicly he presents himself as a paragon of mundanity. There’s nothing overtly pulpy about occupying a minor position in the British government.  And yet, we see over and over that he can’t resist a touch of spy-drama: kidnappings, abandoned parking garages, dead people on a plane…

  


> MYCROFT: He does love to be dramatic.  
>  JOHN: Well, thank God _you’re_ above all that.

Here again, John neatly skewers Mycroft’s dramatic inclinations as out of step with the ordinary world John believes they inhabit.  

As the show progresses, the narrative maintains this precarious balancing act, repeatedly puncturing its own gestures toward pulp sensationalism.  In THoB, the demonically-possessed hound that Henry fears turns out to be a beloved pet dog.  The skeleton of Jack the Ripper turns out to be a modern hoax.  Sherlock tells us that he “can never resist a touch of drama”, and in TAB, MindPalace!Moriarty takes him to task for this: 

  


> MORIARTY: I mean, come on, be serious. Costumes, the gong. Speaking as a criminal mastermind, we don’t really have gongs, or special outfits.

One of the most interesting instances of the writers’ playfulness on this subject is the introduction of Sherlock’s parents in S3.  Thanks to certain lurid hints and implications, much of fandom decided early on that the Holmes brothers must come from a recognizably Gothic, storybook background: ancient and infinite wealth, a crumbling estate, eccentric relatives, dark family secrets…  But when the parents were introduced in TEH, the characters as written seemed calculated to undercut this pulpy fantasy.  Even John was shocked at how ordinary they were, with their reading glasses, lottery tickets, throw pillows, and penchant for Andrew Lloyd Weber.  

  


Here was yet another place where Sherlock and Mycroft’s taste for flashy genre tropes was set at odds to the more prosaic reality they inhabit.    

So then, what happened in TFP? In TFP, this initial reversal of expectation gets reversed once again.  Instead of the embarrassingly ordinary background we learned about in S3, we get every overheated Gothic trope we could have hoped for: the abandoned family manse, the child murdered under mysterious circumstances, and of course the mad sister left to languish in a secret asylum controlled by her domineering brother.  Anne Radcliffe and Monk Lewis could hardly have imagined anything more lurid.  Did Moftiss abandon their tradition of undermining these well-worn cliches, and decide to embrace them for once?

Two elements of TFP suggest to me that this is not the case.  First is the brief but significant mention of the “funny” gravestones at Musgrave.  

  


> MYCROFT: They weren’t real. The dates were all wrong. An architectural joke which fascinated Sherlock.

Mycroft refers to Musgrave as their “ancestral home”, but if the Holmes family were really old-money aristocracy out of a Gothic novel, they would have *real* gravestones on their property, memorializing their *actual* ancestors. The fact that they have this pretend graveyard suggests that the whole family has always been playing at inhabiting these literary tropes.  

The other is the opening with Mycroft’s nightmare scenario of evil clowns, sinister children, and bleeding paintings, which turns out to be a nothing more than a cruel practical joke. This sequence clearly parallels the “experiment” Sherlock, Mycroft, and John are subjected to once they get to Sherrinford.  As cruel and deadly as Eurus’s games are, they share a family resemblance with Sherlock’s own ethically dubious experiments, games, and jokes: 

  


  


  


In each case, Sherlock is using an artificial environment to elicit extreme emotions from an unwilling subject – much the same as what Eurus eventually does to him.   

Eurus, then, illustrates profoundly what the audience was previously willing to ignore: the real horror of childish games of storybook-cruelty enacted by brilliant adults who never quite grew up.

TFP represents a kind of peak-Holmes, where all the Holmes siblings revert to and revel in their very silliest childhood fantasies.  Mycroft gets his sword-gun-umbrella, Sherlock gets to be a pirate, and Eurus gets to be the mad scientist, running experiments on her brothers.  

  


>   EURUS: Enough for now. Time to play a _new_ game.

The game is still on, albeit a more deadly version.

So, is this conflict between the Holmes family’s schlock-literary fantasies and the mundane “real world” ever resolved?  Maybe.  Sherlock ends Eurus’s game by disrupting her fantasy scenario and “bringing her down to earth”, after all.

  


And yet, the idea that we’re left with is that our heroes are about to become the stuff of myth, of legend – in other words, of literary fantasy.  In the end, BBC Sherlock resists the narrative imperative to choose one route or the other, or even to integrate them into some compromise middle ground.  

Rather, the narrative splits daringly in two: Sherlock and John may live in a real world, with its faulty chip and pin machines and performances of Les Miz, but Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are recognized to inhabit a higher plane, filled with arch-enemies, reformed assassins, mad secret sisters, phantasmagoric drug binges, and maybe an occasional dose of swashbuckling.


End file.
